Clay: Can't you speak to her? note A T. rex You're practically one of those critters! Dojo:note A dragonI beg your pardon!! That's like saying you're practically a monkey! She's prehistoric, and that's offensive to dragons! Just because she speaks with a British accent doesn't make her smart! We breathe fire, fly, and chew with our mouths closed!

What could be more dangerous (or more awesome) than a T. rex? A T. rex that flies and breathes fire.

This is a good example of a trope that appears to be changing from one thing to another. Basically, some people just can't get over how similar some dinosaurs are to dragons.

Both are big lizardy things, right? They're already so similar, why not have all dinosaurs be fearsome carnivores? Because hey — big lizard things just have to eat meat, just like dragons! And if they ever meet with humans, they must messily devour them all! Just like dragons!

And while we're at it, why not associate dinosaurs with lava-spewing volcanoes? Or even give them the ability to breathe fire? It'd be a shame not to, right?

There is a bit more justification for this confusion in Eastern media; it's largely due to a long-standing translation mixup. When people discovered fossil bones in ancient China, they figured they were dragon bones (to be more precise, bones shed by dragons who haveachieved their final, fully airborne forms). Many crushed dinosaur fossils were sold over the years as "dragon bone powder." No one knows how many important discoveries were lost due to the superstition. In any case, the words for "dragon" and "prehistoric creature" in most Asian languages are very similar, and sometimes it's simply used to refer to both dinosaurs and dragons. This goes a longnote "Long" is Mandarin for dragon, "Kong Long" for dinosaur way to explain why many Chinese dinosaurs have dragon-derived names. Not to mention why, especially in video games, dinosaur-like creatures have fire-breathing abilities and dragon-like creatures are identified as dinosaurs.

The Western origins of this trope are a bit more complicated. It may have something to do with the popular notion that associates ancient times with loads and loads of flame-spewing volcanoes. There was a lot of volcanic activity during the Cretaceous, but it certainly was nowhere near as violent as depicted in fiction, and it had more to do with poison gas than rivers of lava and hellfire raining down everywhere. But take a look at early paleo-art and you'll not only see tons of lava, but also many dinosaurs who look suspiciously like dragons wandering in this hellish, primeval, pre-human landscape. Some art critics, like W. J. T. Mitchell, have wondered if the older "tripod stance" seen in early depictions of bipedal dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex is meant to at least subconsciously bring to mind images of the Biblical "upright serpent". Speaking of, this trope probably has some relationship with the belief, held by both certain creationists and some cryptozoologists, that some dinosaurs survived the mass extinction and inspired the stories of dragons. One Kent Hovind goes so far as to say that some species "must" have breathed fire (because The Bible — or at least the King James Version, which was made and named for a man who literally wrote a book on witch hunting — mentions dragons) and may still exist in some Lost World in The Amazon or somewhere.

The older version of the trope is gradually becoming more and more discredited as it filters into the pop-culture consciousness that dinosaurs, really, were just another kind of animal. The newer version comes at the issue from a different angle: now it's more like Dragons Are Dinosaurs. Quite a few anthropologists are now suggesting that many of the legends of fantastic beasts were based upon misinterpreted fossils.

In any case, look for fantasy worlds where wizards are finding dragon fossils and local legendary dragons who turn out to be surviving dinosaurs.

Examples:

To explain in advance, the Japanese word for dinosaur "Kyouryuu", translates to "fear dragon".

In Yu-Gi-Oh!, Dragons are dinosaurs... sort of. Dinosaur Ryuzaki (Rex Raptor in the dub) has a Dinosaur Theme Deck. However, his two strongest monsters, Serpent Night Dragon and Red-Eyes Black Dragon, are dragons. (And in his second duel with Jounouchi later, he adds Tyrant Dragon to his deck.) Possibly justified as dragons are not affected by the arbitrary dinosaur weakness, and Ryusaki may even be exploiting the confusion here. This is likely because there were too few dinosaur cards at the time the character was created to make a full deck, so obviously the next best thing is dragons.

Almost all of the Dinosaur-Type monsters in the various Yu-Gi-Oh! video games are shown breathing fire for their attacks.

Ryuzaki specifically notes that the Serpent Night Dragon and the Red-Eyes Black Dragon are his special rare cards (he won the Serpent Night Dragon at a tournament), which makes them an acceptable exception to his dinosaur-themed deck. He's just showing off by having them - and ends up losing both anyway.

Jim "Crocodile" Cook in Yu-Gi-Oh! GX's deck features Fossil Dragons, which are essentially walking fossilized dinosaur skeletons. He explains that this is a tribute to the above-mentioned "dragon bones" confusion. For the record, the Fossil Dragons in question are neither Dragon nor Dinosaur: they're Rock.

Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V: While Odd-Eyes Pendulum Dragon and all of its forms are Dragon-Types, most of them resemble dinosaurs, due to their lack of wings and their primary way of locomotion, which is running.

Digimon is full of dinosaur mons which can breathe fire, primarily of the Tyrannosaurus rex variety. Many of these fill the role of The Hero's Bond Creature in any given series, when that role isn't filled by an actual dragon mon. Greymon and GeoGreymon are nearly perfect embodiments of this trope. It's justified in the case of Guilmon; he's an Ascended Fanboy's drawing come to life, was specifically based upon the aforementioned Greymon, and isn't particularly bright to begin with.

An odd variation of the trope: the "dramon" family is a subset of mons possessing the "DNA" of a dragon ancestor mon and thus considered to be "true" dragons, and this grouping does include some obvious dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex-based or otherwise. Not all "dramon" Digimon can breathe fire, but the trope applies in the sense of them being considered dragons. For example: Cannondramon, a Cyborg Digimon of this family, looks like a diplodocus with railguns strapped to its back.

Dinosaur King is an... interesting attempt to make a generic Mon show with actual animals. It was even weirder to see them change shape, breathe fire, and perform "electric tackles".

The Dinosaur Empire in Getter Robo occasionally gave fire-breathing abilities to their Dinosaur-type Robeasts. They also gave them Missile Launchers and Death Rays, so some tinkering is to be expected.

In Naruto, Orochimaru's Orochi form is heavily influenced by modern depictions of dinosaurs, being partially covered in feathers.

If you forget that they are actually aliens, the T. rex from the Dinosaur Arc of Gantz has the power to send fireballs through his mouth.

In Cardfight!! Vanguard, there are a lot of dragons, but the Tachikaze clan, being prehistoric-themed, are the only clan with dinosaur-themed units. They have a unique race of robotic dinosaurs; however, they are called the "Dinodragons," which makes no reference to their most unique feature - the robotic parts - but instead bafflingly signposts them as another kind of dragon.

Furthermore, in booster set 11, an archetype of similarly-named units was introduced, called the "Ancient Dragons", which are all just robotic dinosaurs with a distinctive colour scheme.

Like the anime and manga, the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game has many instances (and some subversions) of this trope.

"Jurrac" is a dedicated Dinosaur archetype that reeks of this trope, with most of its monsters either breathing or otherwise manipulating fire in some way. It mostly works, by virtue of adding in some meteor/volcano symbolism.

Averted in Magic: The Gathering, since "dinosaur" and "dragon" are distinct creature types. However, Ixalan does reference this in its reprint of Dragonskull Summit, where it is stated that a planeswalker mistook the native dinosaurs for dragons and now the word "dragon" is a synonym for "dinosaur" in some pirate circles.

Comic Books

While the dragons in Bone come in all shapes and sizes, some look like dinosaurs with wings attached to them, most notably a T. rex, a Stegosaur, and a sauropod.

Also worth noting that they make a distinction between "true dragons" (dinosaurs) and "heraldic dragons" (the fire breathing flying ones, presumably. The only "heraldic dragons" we see are mechanical).

Films — Animated

Oddly, Fantasia may have a lot to do with the volcano subtrope. "Rite of Spring" begins with a seemingly endless field of lava-spewing volcanoes. A short and easily missed transition shows the progress of life on Earth and then suddenly cuts to an extended scene set during the late Cretaceous. Given that this is one of the most influential dinosaur film moments ever, perhaps many people missed the transition....

Films — Live-Action

Godzilla is either a dragon or a dinosaur depending on which fan you ask. Indeed, the fantastic nature of most Kaiju sways from one extreme to the other depending on the movie. The original film says that he's a sea-dwelling dinosaur (not to different from his current self) who was resurrected and mutated by the miracle of atomic mutation and he just happened to fit into the local dragon mythology, which is full of Virgin Sacrifice.

His origin is given much more clearly in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah which reveals he really is a mutated dinosaur that became a legendary figure.

The confusion among English-speaking fans, at least, is probably due to the American dub of Godzilla Raids Again. In it, an educational film reel explained that dinosaurs, including Godzilla (there called Gigantis) and Anguirus, were created from pools of burning lava and sulfur, resulting in their being walking fire elementals of sorts.

The beginning narration in Reign of Fire mentions that scientists found fossils that confirm that dragons were responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs. This doesn't state their relation to the dinosaurs, but may imply a distant relation.

Literature

Defied rather fatally in Bearing an Hourglass where Gawain the the dragon slayer, prior to the events of the novel, dies at the jaws of an allosaur he thought was a dragon. In-universe, the two are very different species with different behavior patterns, and the allosaur's persistence caused Gawain to be crushed to death inside his own armor.

Several years earlier than Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real (enough to wonder if a lawsuit could be justified), Peter Dickinson's book The Flight of Dragons took the view that dragons were long-surviving prehistoric creatures — though not necessarily dinosaurs. He provides plausible means whereby dragons could be huge, breathe fire, have a reason to hoard gold, and so on, all based on the mechanism whereby they flew. He even sketches out an evolutionary path, and provides a reason why neither fossils nor cave paintings of dragons should exist. Though the "no fossils" explanation is a little hard to swallow, since he says that the powerful acids that dragons use to make hydrogen would dissolve the entire body when the dragon dies. 1) The head, neck, and tail at least would be safely out of range of the fluids, and 2) the acids would spread and drain away out of the body along with becoming neutralized from reacting with things.

One character in the Drenai books by David Gemmell remembers "dragon" skeletons that he saw in a museum, while thinking that it was impossible for such animals to breathe fire without burning their own long throats. Given that we're dealing with quite low Low Fantasy here, it is implied that he saw just a mundane dinosaur fossil.

The Kill All Humans aspect is ubiquitous in pulp fiction. Authors seemed to like portraying every dinosaur species, including such herbivores as triceratops and stegosaurs, as carnivorous. Not only that, but both the legitimate carnivores and the herbivores appear to prefer humans over any other potential prey.

In a Tarzan novel, our hero meets a Stegosaurus who can fly (using its spiky things as aerofoils).

Interestingly, in more recent years, some paleontologists (such as Greg Paul and Mark Witton) have suggested that at least some ceratopsians habitually added some protein to their diet; carrion and maybe even small animals. There's direct fossil evidence for omnivory in at least one ceratopsian, Psittacosaurus. So a meat-eating Triceratops isn't that outlandish; it's just that it would be more similar to the same behavior in wild boar. (The obsession with eating humans is still silly, and the flying Stegosaurus thing is just hilarious.)

Even modern deer will chew up a bit of carcass if they get their teeth on it. Protein is protein, even for most herbivores.

In the Robert A. Heinlein novel Glory Road, the heroes encounter a dragon in the Medieval European Fantasy world they are in. The novel presents the dragon as a dinosaur which due to evolutionary traits (a high sulfur content in its body) had the ability to breathe fire.

Played with in Larry Niven's Warlock universe where, as mana is used up, the magical great dragons die off and metamorphose into rocky skeletons embedded in the rocks and stones of the mountains.

Conan encounters what he calls a dragon (clearly an - unaccountably predatory - Stegosaurus from the description) in the Robert E. Howard story Red Nails. It is later revealed to have been reanimated from fossils by magic.

The Red Nails dragon doesn't really resemble a Stegosaurus except in the broadest sense. It has a large head like a snake's, a scorpion tail, serrated spines on its back, and a generally lizard-like body shape. However, Barry Windsor-Smith chose to depict it as a Stegosaurus in the Savage Sword of Conan adaptation of Red Nails.

Dinotopia is an island populated by Intellectual Dinosaurs and shipwrecked humans. Those who escaped from the island in ancient times are the source of dragon mythology.

This trope comes into play in-universe in The Stone Dance of the Chameleon. The world in which these books are set has all sorts of prehistoric flora and fauna around, including many kinds of dinosaurs. Among these dinosaurs are the huimur, some kind of triceratops that is usually used as pack animal. Giant versions of these animals are outfitted with towers similar to those on war elephants, and flame pipes, and these are generally called dragons. Even so, the protagonist's father forbids him from using that word because he feels it to be barbarous.

In The Iron Teeth web serial among the many other types of monsters they're are huge lizard creatures called drakes. Drakes are feathered and have been referred to as Saurans. So, they're totally an evolved form of dinosaur and an example of this trope.

The Creatonist/Cryptid novel The Lost Kingdom featured the Congo cryptid Mokele-mbembe as a living Sauropod dinosaur that had the ability to breathe fire. This was, sadly not the most scientifically implausible thing featured in the book.

Live-Action TV

Played in a unique fashion by Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real, a Discovery ChannelMockumentary that showed "genuine" dragons as a species of prehistoric creature that survived into modern times, and which possessed a variety of fire-breathing that had a plausible biological explanation. They didn't say anything about them actually being dinosaurs, but the their overall physiological structure was consistent with that of a dinosaur.

Also averted, as the other species of dragon shown were more closely related to crocodiles than dinosaurs, being semi-aquatic and possessing a crocodile's false palate (a valve in the back of the throat), which keeps both water and fire from entering the dragons' lungs.

Though not technically dinosaurs, This trope was invoked, perhaps unintentionally, with the rather draconic-looking pterosaurs in the prehistoric dragon segment. Also, the Cretaceous period was depicted as an ash-choked wasteland with a sparse covering of forests and mountains.

Played straight in a more recent special, Dragons Or Dinosaurs: Creation Or Evolution. In it, the 'experts' suggest that the legends of dragons were based upon dinosaurs. Despite the illogical claims, it is surprisingly well researched.

The creationist antagonist in the second season of Waterloo Road held this view, and used it to sway several of the students (including a regular cast member who had been established as very impressionable) because dragons are cool.

In Zyuranger / MMPR, the Five-Man Band got mecha that were either dinosaurs or prehistoric animals we're fairly certain *existed*. The Sixth Ranger? Giant mechanical dragon. This goes further in the Sentai example, because these particular heroes are actually warriors who existed at the time of the dinosaurs and who were revived in the modern age, and their "designations" (i.e. their Ranger names and their mecha) are actually dinosaur gods that watch over and protect them.

Spoony I never really understood what the Green Ranger's Humongous Mecha was. He doesn't even fit into the whole dinosaur thing, he just yells "Dragonzord!" And I have no idea where dragons fit into the whole dinosaur thing.

When PR started using Dairanger footage, the dinosaur (or not) Humongous Mecha were explicitly transformed into mythical creature Humongous Mecha - of course, the Tyrannosaurus became a dragon.

The Japanese TV series Dinosaur Prince was about a boy who grew up in a strange island and befriended a fire-breathing Brontosaurus. It turns out the island was actually created by alien invaders to grow superpowered dinosaurs for use as living weapons to conquer the world with. Naturally , Prince and his dino were often asked by outsiders to help battle the other monsters.

Primeval has a time-displaced Dracorex getting caught in the Middle Ages before making another jump to 2009. Most of the plot of the episode revolves around convincing an equally-lost medieval knight that it's not a dragon and that he doesn't need to kill it.

Primeval is a special example as the existence of animals travelling through the time anomalies is heavily implied to be the origin of mythical creatures, and the Monster of the Week is many times deliberately designed to resemble those myths it "inspired". In this case, Dracorex is given a pair of "unfossilizable" dorsal membranes that look like bat wings (but aren't).

Season 2, episode 4 features a dinosaur that can breathe fire. Perhaps justified because the series takes place in a Lost World, not in prehistoric times, and it's established that life exists that is descended from prehistoric creatures but didn't exist in prehistoric times (such as lizard men).

In a different episode, a medieval city calls on the heroes to slay a dragon, but they find that it is just a T. rex, though they realize the medieval citizens would not know that.

Sid & Marty Kroft's Land of the Lost featured a gigantic, fire-breathing Dimetrodon called Torchy, whose diet included raw coal that it found exposed on the walls of a canyon.

Poetry

In the most famous section of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H. dinosaurs are the primordial "dragons of the prime, / That tare each other in their slime..."

Tabletop Games

The Old World of Darkness played this straight in the mythos of Werewolf: The Apocalypse. One of the species of Changing Breeds are the Mokole. Nominally, they're weregators, except for the fact that, since they serve as Gaia's Memory, their War Form can be anything sufficiently lizardy drawn from earthly history. Most of them go for dinosaurs mish-mashes, but there are Eastern variants that can become dragons.

Dungeons & Dragons averts this. Dinosaurs are nothing more than animals, though they're cool enough that they aren't listed in one appendix in the Monster Manual, where animals normally are, but instead under their own heading. Which makes D officially (and suitably) the most feared section of all creature books for D, what with dragons, demons, devils, dinosaurs, and Dire Beasts.

Some of the dragon-related source books take an interesting approach to this issue by suggesting that dragons may be evolutionary descendants of dinosaurs, sixty-millions-years on. (This might be more plausible if Young Earth Creationists weren't absolutely right in most D&D worlds.)

In the 4th Edition D&D books, herbivorous dinosaurs were renamed "behemoths", in an effort to avoid anachronisms. In the 4th edition Monster Manual, we have a "Bloodspike Behemoth" (a Stegosaurus), and a "Macetail Behemoth" (an Ankylosaurus). But the carnivorous dinos are now called "drakes".

Castle Falkenstein is set in a parallel 19th century, replete with magic. Dragons are part of the political scene and are known to be the descendants of pterosaurs who survived the extinction of the dinosaurs by developing intelligence and magic.

In RuneQuest the dinosaurs are imperfect dragons who are born that way because the dragon had given into certain vices in past life. Or something like that. The dragon lifespan and spiritual life was never too clear in Glorantha. The game even advices the GM to avoid using dragons if he finds them too confusing.

The Fantasia example was translated over into "real" life in 1966 when Disneyland added the animatronic Primeval World diorama to their Disneyland Railroad attraction. In the Diorama, a T. rex is depicted fighting aStegosaurus in the midst of a volcanic landscape.

Video Games

In the Adventure Island franchise, one of the ridable dinosaurs has fire breath as his power.

A friend of the main character in Little Big Adventure is called Dinofly, and he looks like a dragon, except he doesn't breathe fire.

The Tyranno boss in Chrono Trigger, for some odd reason, breathes fire.

Yoshi of the Super Mario Bros. series was referred to as a dragon and a dinosaur interchangeably in Nintendo publications early on (in the Japanese version of Super Mario World, he signs his name as "Super Dragon Yoshi"), although Nintendo seems to have mastered the distinction now. He can't breathe fire or fly on his own, but occasional power-ups can give him those abilities.

Yoshi's Final Smash in Super Smash Bros. Brawl puts him firmly in dragon territory — he grows wings, becomes invincible, and flies around the screen breathing fire. It's even called the "Super Dragon".

Also, in Super Mario World (which introduced Yoshi to the series), when Mario or Luigi stomps on a Dino-Rhino on Chocolate Island, it shrinks and becomes a Dino-Torch, which breathes fire upward.

Mention must also be made of the SMW boss called "Reznor" (yes) He is/It is/They are four fireball-spitting Triceratops spinning on a waterwheel.

Everything on Dino-Island (the setting of World) is closer to a dragon then a dinosaur. The Rex enemy doesn't look at all like a T. rex, but rather like a purple Celtic dragon.

And there's the Big Bad himself, Bowser. He looks like a dinosaur...turtle...thing, but he also breathes fire and holds the princess hostage in a castle.

Pokémon both uses and averts this trope. While it is possible to teach many of the dinosaur-like Pokémon in the series to breathe fire, naturally-learned fire breathing is left to Fire Pokémon and the actual Dragons. Also, it is possible to teach fire-breathing to many other creatures that bear no resemblance to dragons or dinosaurs.

The Dragon-type Haxorus line is based on dinosaurs, according to Word of God. More specifically, it was mainly based on herbivorous dinosaurs (from appearances, that includes ceratopsians and possibly some pachycephalosaurids), and lo and behold, it's stated to be a herbivore itself.

In the first game, the Dragon type consisted exclusively of the Dratini-Dragonair-Dragonite line. Dragon-type trainer Lance's team thus needed some additions - including Aerodactyl.

Aerodactyl is this Trope on itself, only played on Pterosaurs instead of Dinosaurs. It's based on a Pterodactyl, but looks like a wyvern.

It is possible to teach Dragon-type moves to most of the non-Dragon-type Pokémon based on bipedal dinosaurs, such as Tyranitar, Groudon, Rampardos and Archeops, as well as the aforementioned Aerodactyl.

Iris's gym team in Pokémon Black and White was all Dragon-Types. Come the sequels, she still mainly uses dragons, but has a few dinosaur-like Pokémon thrown in too, much like Lance.

Pokémon X and Y gives us Tyrunt (as well as its fully-evolved form of Tyrantrum), one of the game's fossil Pokemon, which is a Dragon-type T. rex.

Plays straight with the egg groups however. Nearly all reptiles are part of the Dragon egg group.

If you choose to get technical, Altaria could qualify, seeing as it's a bird (and birds are dinosaurs) that also happens to be Dragon-type.

Pokémon Sun and Moon introduces Jangmo-o and its evolutions, Hakamo-o and Kommo-o, more Dragon-type Pokémon that are based on dinosaurs—in the case of the evolved forms, they're clearly theropods like the aforementioned Tyrunt and Tyrantrum.

Final Fantasy VI had an infamous translation error where the Japanese word for "dinosaur" (kyoryu) was translated as "frightful dragon" — in a part of the game where the player's goal was to find dragons, causing much confusion.

The sprites for the Brachiosaur and the Tyrannosaur were used (with similar colors even) for two actual dragons: Tyrannosaur? Earth Dragon. Brachiosaur? Gold Dragon.

The Ice Dragon has the same sprite as the Vectaur, a small, vaguely dinosaur-like enemy that can be encountered in Kefka's tower.

Final Fantasy XII somewhat rationalizes this by defining the dragon genus as an overarching term for most large reptiles, so including the more traditional wyrms and wyverns and the more historical theropods in the same evolutionary chain.

Popn Music has a character called Dino, who is a fire-breathing dinosaur.

Averted in the game E.V.O.: Search for Eden, where the dinosaurs are... just dinosaurs. Although one of the "hidden forms" you could briefly take was a flying horned dragon. To acquire this powerful One-Winged Angel form, you'll have to turn into a bird, so technically this dragon is a dinosaur.

Tales of Symphonia has a science academy which contains the assembled skeleton of a dragon on display. A nearby scholar indicates that it was a prehistoric creature that lived long ago. Nevertheless, many varieties of real, living dragons exist in the game, including both winged and non-winged varieties, some of which have even been domesticated for human use. Unfortunately for the scientists, they mostly live in places that they are unlikely to ever see.

In Tales of Eternia, one can encounter dinosaurs. They're big green lizardy things with tiny arms and lots of teeth. Also, they breathe fire. Making it worse, elsewhere, one can find actual dragons, which are exactly like red Dinosaurs with tiny wings.

King Dodongo from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, an "Infernal Dinosaur" who lives inside a volcano and breathes fire. By Twilight Princess, the dodongos - though still volcano-dwelling firebreathers - are redesigned to be more lizardlike.

Subverted in the Monster Hunter games. Most of the monsters to be hunted are either dragons or wyverns. Does not stop new players from calling wyverns "those big dinosaur-like things".

Though in-universe "Dragon" is actually just a term for "absurdly powerful and unclassifiable creature", even the dragons that are reptilian have very little similarities among each other, whereas wyverns are divided into families that all bear an acceptable amount of resemblance to one another.

A notable exception added in the third generation is the "Brute Wyvern", most of which tend to use the Tyrannosaurus rex as their base form. So far though, only one of them has a Breath Weapon.

One of the versions of the second Mega Man Star Force game is "Fire Dinosaur". They changed it to "Fire Saurian" in the US release, probably thinking nobody would know what it meant, and if they did, they wouldn't care. They were right.

The Dragos of MOTHER 3 are simply regular dinosaurs. The one Drago that falls victim to the Pig Army's chimerization plot gains the ability to breathe fire. (Though from the looks of its sprite, it appears that they just shoved a flamethrower down its throat.)

This applies to nearly all the monsters in the game. They are ancient gods known as the Draconians yet most of them resemble dinosaurs. Sauron and Diablo are Tyrannosaur monsters, Armadon is some sort of Ankylosaur/Triceratops/Stegosaur hybrid, and Talon is a Deinonychus god (Only Vertigo, Chaos, and Blizzard are not saurian in appearance with Vertigo being an inter-dimensional cobra goddess and Chaos and Blizzard being ape/yeti monsters respectively). However, they aren't dinosaurs. They just '''look''' like dinosaurs and were even stated to have caused the extinction of the actual dinosaurs in the game's storyline.

The title character of the Sega Genesis/Super Nintendo game Radical Rex breathes fire as his main weapon.

Turok averts this trope by having a Dinosaur with bionic enhancements; flamethrowers situated at the Tyrannosaur's head spit fire, making it look similar to a dragon.

In the first Devil May Cry, two puzzles require defeating fire-breathing dragons. Said dragons are T. rex skeletons that spit fireballs at you. (But then again, this isDevil May Cry.)

Mostly averted in Warcraft games. There are several creatures that look like dinosaurs or other prehistoric reptiles, most notably devilsaurs (T. rex with some spines on their back), raptors, treshadons (plesiosaur-lookalikas) and stegadons (stegosaur-like creatures with a large horned head instead of a tiny one like the real things had). Most don't breathe fire, but many stegadon variants (called thunder lizards) shoot lightning out of their horn.

A lot of these are commonly found in areas with lots of lava

In World of Warcraft, dinosaurs are clearly labeled "beasts" instead of "dragonkin". Also, just to be fair, while few people know this, it is heavily implied in some tauren quests that the "thunder lizards" (lightning shooting stegodons) are not dinosaurs, but magical beasts (that Blizz just reused the model of for the stegodons) of a different sort.

Comedically, a new NPC in Un'Goro Crater can be constantly heard shouting about Dragons and his attempts to kill them. When you finally meet the man (Maxamillian of Northshire) it turns out he thinks the dinosaurs of the are are, well, dragons.

According to Touhou, dragons are an ancient race nearly on the same level as the Yaoyorozu no Kami (8 million deities). According to Morichika Rinnosuke in the source material Curiosities of Lotus Asia, the world outside of Gensokyo has been re-naming dragon fossils as various types of dinosaurs.

Fossil Fighters explicitly explains that the revived animals (which include more than just dinosaurs) gained superpowers as a side-effect of the cloning process, which is why that T. rex is breathing fire and that Dilophosaurus is shooting out gallons of water.

The devs also admitted in an interview that they did this due to the Rule of Fun: "If we were to make it realistic, the only things the dinosaurs could do is either bite or stomp. That's why we gave each dinosaur attributes like fire or water, because we thought it would be fun to play if they breathed fire and stuff."

The dragons seen in the minigame "Dragon Drop" in Crash Bash definitely invoke this trope. They look like Baby T except with bat-like ears, minuscule wings, and different colours. The 'T' in 'Baby T', as hinted by the trope name, stands for Tyrannosaurus Rex. In fact, a low-res Baby T model was used as a placeholder while the dragons were being programmed into the game.

Space Station Silicon Valley had Borassic Park, where fire-breathing dinosaurs made an appearance. Unfortunately, they (and the other dinos in that level) were invincible obstacles, not robotic animals, and therefore you could not possess them.

In EverQuest II, in the dungeon "Vasty Deep: The Abandoned Labs", the players discover a suprisingly anatomically accurate Tyrannosaurus rex floating in a giant test tube. They mistake it for a kind of dragon they don't recognize.

7th Dragon has various dragons that resemble dinosaurs, though to be fair there are also dragons that look like other animals.

A boss from the Kirby series, Ice Dragon, is a small dinosaur that first debuted in Kirby's Dream Land 2.

Dragon Quest VI: Axe-wielding, fire-breathing crested tyrannosaurs can be found as enemies. One (Lizzie) can even be recruited.

In Skylanders, one particular character, Bash, is classified as an Earth dragon. The fact that he's without wings and fire breath can be attributed to the fact that he's affiliated with Earth, but he also has an Ankylosaur-like mace tail and ceratopsian-style frilled head; and he can even get a horned helmet that is explicitly modeled on a Triceratops.

There's also Dino-Rang, a dinosaur-man who is reported to get rather peeved when he's mistaken for a dragon.

Hidden Palace's T. rex badniks in the iOS version of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 breathe fire at Sonic when he gets close.

This trope is zig-zagged in Warlords Battlecry III. While dinosaurs and dragons are clearly separate units (every race potentially has access to dragons, while dinos are Ssrathi melee units), the Dragonslayer class has a skill that grants bonus XP to both dragon and dinosaur units

In Dragon Age: Inquisition, you can encounter "phoenixes" and "deepstalkers" which look like raptors (complete with feathers) and compsognathus, respectively. Of course, the phoenixes can actually breathe fire.

Rhi'a's personal quest in Sands of Destruction has you freeing her ancestor from a curse that's keeping him a zombie. Naturally, this ancient dragon bears a striking resemblance to a T. rex, as do some of the Random Encounters around the Dragonkin Ruins of the current day. Rhi'a's grandfather appearing as a skeleton is also likely meant to bring fossils to mind, because Everything's Better with Dinosaurs!

Subverted in Half-Minute Hero, in the Princess 30, the princess learns that a Dragon Scale can cure her father, so she kills a dragon-like monster and gives the scale to him, but it doesn't work, and then it is explained the monster was a dinosaur, not a dragon.

The fan-winged dragons in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! evolved from Kuehneosaurus (a real-life lizard that lived in the Triassic and which had "wings" formed from overlong ribs which extended out from its body; it is believed to have used these to parachute from trees). The dragons destroyed their civilization in a war — wiping out the dinosaurs in the process — after which they became peaceful, pastoral creatures. Millions of years later, when human knights and hunters began "slaying" them, they revived their old technology and left Earth for the planet Butane in the Kuiper Belt.

In thisBad Gods comic, a character tries in vain to explain the difference between dinosaurs and dragons.

Wexter, the T. rex pet of Axe Cop, breathes fire, though this may be justified by the sheer number of super-powers invented on the spot for anything and everything.

There's a scene in The Ultimate Battle arc that lampshades this. Axe Cop explains that Wexter must be transformed into a dragon and, at Sockarang's protests ("He can already fly and breath fire!"), insists that there's a significant difference between dragons and flying, fire-breathing tyrannosaurs.

Web Original

While most of the dragons in Dragon Cave are fully based on classical mythology (either Eastern or Western style), this is played straighter with the 'wyverns', a sub-category of Western dragons whose have wings in the place of arms, giving the impression of a flying, magical velociraptor.

There are also the inexplicable actual dinosaurs that very rarely show up, but those are shout-outs to Yoshi.

Western Animation

Discussed in Xiaolin Showdown, though at one point the T. rex swallows a fireball, spits it back out, and survives a gigantic explosion with no ill-effects.

The Dinobots' trademark attack is fire breath; Slag (the Triceratops) actually had "Flamethrower" as his official assigned function. (Well, at least they're robots.) The ones in Animated also breathed fire and were made from animatronic dinosaurs, but they weren't suppose to have it; it was something Megatron, who was working with an unwitting Sumdac, added so they would have a weapon.

The Megatron from Beast Wars started as a Tyrannosaurus, but somehow (thanks to the original Megatron's spark and a lava dunking) gained a huge dragon form near the end of the series. The fact that he's a robot makes it a little easier to take, but considering they created their beast modes using scanned DNA, the dragon really comes out of nowhere, unless the G1 animated continuity episode: "A Decepticon Raider In King Aurthur's Court" is canon, then dragons really did exist in cartoon G1 Earth.

Megatron's Concept art ran this up to 11 and then some. Apparently the next stage in a mythological creatures upgrade involved giving him a second head. This design was later recycled into Robots In Disguise Megs, who turned into a two-headed dragon. In a series where every animal was based on real-life DNA, this was a serious Bizarro Episode.

Played with in Transformers Prime. The Decepticons use Fossil Revival (from "cybernucleic acid") to revive Predacons, ancient Cybertronians who were wiped out in a cataclysm. Jack makes the T. rex comparison, but the first one created is a fire-breathing dragon. Turns out the first Predacon clones had a long vigil on Earth, inspiring a lot of human folklore.

Extremely evident in Gumby, where Prickle would claim to be a dragon in some episodes (and breathe fire), and insist he was a dinosaur in others.

What makes the inconsistency especially stupid is that there's a whole episode devoted to him proving he's a dinosaur so he can get into an ice cream parlor that doesn't allow dragons (because they melt the ice cream).

While the series has other problems, The Flintstones had a dino/dragon who doubled as a lighter or an oven. ("It's a living...")

In Disney's American Dragon: Jake Long, Jake's magic-hunting teacher Mr..(Or rather Prof.) Rotwood had the theory that dragons were evolutions of the dinosaurs. Being the American Dragon, Jake knew this was a bunch of hooey.

Spike, the baby dragon from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, is sometimes mistaken by new fans for a young dinosaur, in part because because he sharesvarioustraits with Yoshi (who is also often interpreted as a dinosaur). The fact that he essentially turns into a purple Godzilla in "Secret Of My Excess," lacking the wings prominently featured on other fully grown dragons in the show, doesn't help much.

Taken to the extreme in the Regular Show episode "Limousine Lunchtime", In order to win a new limo, Mordecai and Rigby must fight other limo drivers to the death, then they have to face a dinosaur, made out of limos, that breathes fire.

This is played with on Doc McStuffins— when Stuffy (toy dragon) and Bronty (toy brontosaurus) meet, Doc says that they are like family and that they could be cousins. In a later installment, Bronty refers to Stuffy as "Cousin Stuffy."

The Japanese uses the same signs for dinosaur, kyouryuu (恐竜 or 恐龍) (竜 is Japanese variant of 龙/龍).

Many dinosaur names include word meaning "dragon"

The skull of the pachycephalosaurus Dracorex hogwartsia is housed at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. Its name, which means "Hogwarts' Dragon King", was voted on by fans of Harry Potter. Most visitors probably see past the name. Though Dracorex's headdoes look a lot like a horned dragon, so the name fits in this case. However, adept paleontologists will notice that the Dracorex's fossil has molars and incisors, rather than canines; it was a herbivore.

Translations of dinosaur names into Chinese almost always include "long", in place of the "saurus" — for example, Tyrannosaurus rex is known as "Ba wang long" or "Bao long", meaning "tyrant king dragon" or "violent dragon".

There's also an oviraptorosaur called Hagryphus ("Ha's gryphon") and Welsh prosauropod called... Pantydraco... (It's... not what it sounds like. It's derived from the Welsh valley "Pant-y-ffynon".)

Name of possible first Polish real dinosaur, Smok wawelski, is just name of a monster from legend well known in Poland. Smok wawelski means "Dragon of Wawel". Wawel is castle on hill in Cracow, former capital of Poland.

Sometimes it is applied to non-dinosaurian reptiles as well. "Bakonydraco" is a pterosaur from Hungary; it doesn't look very much like a dragon though, and the azhdarchid family of pterosaurs are named for a legendary Persian dragon. The most famous of them, Quetzalcoatlus, was named for the feathered serpent God Quetzalcoatl from Aztec Mythology. Given its immense size◊ and status as an apex predator, the resemblance between it and a dragon is not difficult to see.

Related to the Dragons Are Dinosaurs version of this trope (although nobody could mistake them for dragons): Homo floresiensis almost instantaneously gained the nickname "Hobbit". H. floresiensis wasn't widespread enough to account for many myths of The Fair Folk.

Adrienne Mayor argues that fossil discoveries are the source for all the myths about giants, gryphons, and dragons in her books.

The original Mediterranean legend of the Gryphon is rather different from the modern, highly symbolic Mix-and-Match Critter we're all familiar with. For one thing, it didn't have wings. Therefore, it's been suggested that it may have started out as an attempt to describe a protoceratops skeleton.

In a related example, it is said that in ancient China, alchemists often ground dinosaur fossils into powders and used them in traditional herbal medicine believing them to be dragon bones.

Not just dinosaur fossils, any fossil seems to qualify for "dragon bone" status (Many of them are actually mammal fossils. iirc, the first Gigantopithecus specimens were discovered this way)

The same happened in Europe. For example, a purported dragon skull conserved in a Swiss church for centuries actually belonged to a woolly rhinoceros.

Also, has anybody ever wondered about the similarities between dromaeosaurs and the feathery half chicken/half reptile cockatrice and/or basilisk? Feathered dinosaur fossils may have been discovered earlier than people think...

Kent "Dr Dino" Hovind claims that dinosaurs were dragons, breathed fire, rode on Noah's Ark and may still be alive in remote places (and was possibly the inspiration for the Waterloo Road example above).

Though some others do claim dragon legends come from human and dinosaur co-existence (mainly young-earth creationists, as opposed to old-earth or progressive creationists, who are more likely to say that it was just the fossils that were the inspiration). It's just that hardly any make the much larger jump from "dragons are inspired by dinosaurs" to "dinosaurs breathed fire."

Recent billboards for the Creation Museum have been using dinosaurs to attract children to the venue. Among the dinosaur signs is a fire-breathing dragon.

Many of the old, outdated reconstructions of dinosaurs, pterosaurs and other Mesozoic reptiles were made to resemble the traditional appearance of dragons. They often sported lizardlike heads with rows of spines running down their backs. Good examples include this (somewhat)◊ and the theropod in this picture◊, who is also Groin Attacking his prey. Ironically, the more accurate later dinosaur reconstructions wound up reshaping the way dragons were envisioned, making them appear more dinosaur-like.

Played with in one online list of the most likely creatures for dragons to be based on. While the highest-listed creatures on the list were pterosaurs, the rest were living reptiles (or, in one case, a living fish, and in another, an inanimate object). See it here[1]

It's generally agreed at this point that the legendary cyclops — a giant with one eye in the middle of its forehead and very pronounced fangs that get forgotten in most modern depictions — was inspired by mammoth skulls. The tusks are the fangs and the central hole for the trunk could easily be mistaken for an eye socket.

Similarly, the inspirations of the western unicorn are quite varied. Among more modern misidentified animals (the horns of narwhals, rhinoceros, antelope or goats/horses with genetic defects) one suggested explanation for the myth stipulates that the unicorn myths might have been started by the folkloric memory or the fossils of ancient European rhinoceros species such as Elasmotherium.

Many sauropods are now believed to have had dragon-like spines down the back of their necks, though these animals are unlikely to have flown or breathed fire, and were herbivores.

When the first Archaeopteryx fossil was found, it was mistaken for a dragon. Archaeopteryx is a genus of early bird that is transitional between feathered dinosaurs and modern birds.

This recent discovery, which refers to the discovered species as a "Dragon Dinosaur".

Yi qi, a recently discovered scansoriopterygid (a group of long-fingered arboreal theropods closely related to birds) dinosaur, which had membranes of skin stretched across its hands, and so likely resembled a tiny feathered wyvern. It was probably not capable of flying, and used its bat-like wings for gliding.

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